Wanderful Media raises $14.5M to digitize circulars

The company launches its Find&Save app for Android

Wanderful Media, the company that’s bringing coupon clipping into the digital age, announced Monday that it has raised $14.5 million in funding from existing media investors. The round brings Wanderful’s total to more than $50 million to date, including a $9 million round last May from Advance Digital, A. H. Belo Corporation, Community Newspaper Holdings Inc., Cox Media Group, The E. W. Scripps Company, Gannett Co. Inc., GateHouse MediaInc., Hearst Corporation, Lee Enterprises, MediaNews Group, The McClatchy Company, and The Washington Post Co.

Wanderful’s consumer-facing site Find&Save launched in 2012 as something of a Pinterest for local papers. The company was the brainchild of 12 major newspapers who came together to bring print circulars (those glossy coupon pages you find in newspapers) into the digital age. Currently, retailers spend $4 billion a year on circulars, but no one clips coupons anymore. These days, if you want to find deals and coupons, you go online or browse around on your phone.

Thus, Find&Save was born. The company launched the Find&Save app last November, shortly before Thanksgiving, to zero in on the Black Friday shopping frenzy. Since then, the company has launched a Find&Save app for iPad. Now, it’s finally launching a Find&Save app for Android. The app comes with features like a nearby sales locator, which shows the user an updated list of all the sales at local stores, new sale alerts from favorite stores, one shopping list across all devices, the ability to browse weekly ads, and the ability to share with friends.

"We have effectively reimagined circulars for the digital, mobile and social age, and as a result Find&Save has quickly become a strategic partner for retailers to retain and grow in-store sales, and an attractive option over Amazon and other e-commerce sites,” said Wanderful CEO Ben Smith, in a statement. “We've come a long way in the last year alone, but we're just getting started."

The company now works with some 500 newspapers (last May, the company was working with 400 newspapers) and more than 400 retailers with over 150,000 store locations nationwide. Wanderful Media sees over 100,000 unique monthly users.

While other coupon sites tend to focus on driving customers across e-commerce and brick-and-mortar retail, Find&Save is really designed to drive customers to brick-and-mortar locations. Circulars tend to create the most engagement among customers. Nielsen data shows that print ads drive more purchase intent than any other form of advertising, including TV and radio. Another survey found that 40% of respondents said they had searched online, visited a website, or purchased a product as a direct result of seeing a print ad in the last month.